www.ccsenet.org/ijel International Journal of English Linguistics Vol. 1, No. 2; September 2011 ISSN 1923-869X E-ISSN 1923-8703 166 Pragmatic Transfer in Iraqi EFL Learners' Refusals Ahmed Qadoury Abed Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, The University of Al-Mustansiriyah, Baghdad, Iraq E-mail: ahmed_121204@yahoo.com Received: March 26, 2011 Accepted: April 26, 2011 doi:10.5539/ijel.v1n2p166 Abstract The present study deals with pragmatic transfer of Iraqi EFL learners' refusal strategies as reflected by their responses to a modified version of 12- items written discourse completion task; and compare with two groups ,namely Iraqi native speakers of Arabic and American native speakers of English. The task consisted of three requests, three offers, three suggestions, and three invitations. Each one of these situations included one refusal to a person of higher status, one to a person of equal status, and one to a person of lower status. Data analyzed according to frequency types of refusal strategies and interlocutor's social status. It is found that the frequency of use of refusals by Iraqi EFL learners is different from that of Americans, though they do share some similarities. Iraqi EFL learners are apt to express refusals with care and/or caution represented by using more statements of reason/explanation, statements of regret, wish and refusal adjuncts in their refusals than Americans. Americans are more sensitive to their interlocutor's higher and equal status, whereas Iraqi EFL learners to lower status. Evidences proved the existence of little difference between IEFL males and females in refusal frequency and refusal adjuncts. Keywords: Refusal strategies, Pragmatic transfer, Discourse Completion Task (DCT), Iraqi EF learners 1. Introduction Much of the work in interlanguage pragmatics has been conducted within the framework of speech acts. Speech acts can be thought of as ‘functions’ of language, such as complaining, thanking, apologizing, refusing, requesting, and inviting. Within this view, the minimal unit of communication is the performance of linguistic act. All languages have a means of performing speech acts and presumably speech acts themselves are universals, yet the ‘form’ used in specific speech acts varies from culture to culture. Thus, the study of second language speech acts is concerned with the linguistic possibilities available in languages for speech act realization and the effect of cross-cultural differences on second language performance and on the interpretation by native speakers of second language speech acts (Wolfson, 1989:183). Numerous studies in interlanguage pragmatics have recognized that the learners’ ability to use appropriate speech acts in a given speech act event and to use appropriate linguistic forms to realize this speech act is a main component of pragmatic competence. Fraser (1983:30) describes pragmatic competence as “the knowledge of how an addressee determines what a speaker is saying and recognizes intended illocutionary force conveyed through subtle attitudes”. Rintell (1997:98) also pointed out that “pragmatics is the study of speech acts”, arguing that L2 learner pragmatic ability is reflected in how learners produce utterances in the target language to communicate specific intentions and conversely, how they interpret the intentions which their utterances convey. One of the consistent findings in the empirical studies of speech act behaviour is that, although the typology of speech acts appears to be universal, their conceptualization and verbalization can vary to a great extent across cultures and languages. In other words, L2 learners may have access to the same range of speech acts and realization strategies as do native speakers, but they can differ from in the strategies that they choose. Therefore, it is clear that L2 learners must be aware of L2 socio-cultural constraints on speech acts in order to be pragmatically competent. When second language learners engage in conversations with native speakers, difficulties may arise due to their lack of mastery of the conversational norms involved in the production of speech acts. Such conversational difficulties may in turn cause breakdowns in interethnic communication (ibid.). When the native speakers violate speech acts realization patterns typically used by native speakers of a target language, they often suffer the perennial risk of inadvertently violating conversational and politeness norms thereby forfeiting their claims to being treated by their interactants as social equals (Kasper, 1990:203ff). Communication difficulties are resulted when conversationalists do not share the same knowledge of the subtle rules governing conversations. Scarcella (1990) ascribes high frequency of such difficulties to the fact that “non-native speakers, when conversing, often transfer the conversational rules of their first language into the second” (p. 338). Refusals are also of interest due to their typically complex constructions. They are often